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Monthly Archives: April 2015

This course was designed by Dr. Carlos Zucco, which since 2005 has been working with the development of low-cost alternatives for monitoring vertebrate through GPS technology. The GPS Collar of this course is the result of different experiences in the field, and laboratory improvements. Therefore presents itself as a great alternative taking into account the cost-effective ratio. The collars constructed in the course are being used in dogs living near of conservation units. The goal is estimate the exploitation area of dogs to help in researchs of environmental impact. The course is on Youtube.

March 2015 began with a huge effort on maintaining populations of Golden Lion Tamarins (GLT – Leontopithecus rosalia): the strategic planning for GLT conservation, organized by the Golden Lion Tamarin Association (AMLD). The meeting gathered experienced researchers on GLT, field experts and all the AMLD team – engaged on animal conservation, forest restoration, and environmental education –, managers from conservation units and Brazilian environmental agencies, as well as landscape ecologists from the Spatial Ecology and Conservation Lab – Universidade Estadual Paulista Julio de Mesquita Filho (UNESP, Rio Claro), from Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro), Universidade Estadual do Norte Fluminense Darcy Ribeiro (UENF, Campos de Goytacazes) and Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO, Rio de janeiro). Using the latest GLT research results, a new map of the forests where GLT live (produced with support of CAPES, CNPq, FAPESP, and AMLD) and more than 30 years of experience, this group put effort on planning actions to create the conditions to maintain viable GLT populations in their natural habitat, the Atlantic rainforest.

Many ecological studies focus on understand how environmental and spatial patterns influences biodiversity and ecological process. At this context, an approach that has been rising up in such studies is the use of functional traits to understanding the patterns of communities. On 11 march, 2015, it was conducted, at UNESP, in Rio Claro, the II Functional Diversity day. In this workshop, undergraduates, post-graduation students, and researchers of five Brazilian Universities (UNESP, USP, ESALQ/USP, UNIFAL and UFSCar) exposed and discussed the use of this approach on their researches. The lectures showed the high level of research that have been developed by such research groups and the discussions contributed both to the improvement of developing studies as in the design of futures projects.

Did you know that bats are very important in our ecosystems? They help restoring native forests when they feed on many fruit species and perform seed dispersal. They are also impressing on plague control and flower pollination. Motivated by that, Renata Muylaert, LEEC PhD candidate, studied their responses to habitat loss. The biologist concluded that to mantain a high bat diversity in a 2000 ha farm, it is necessary to have at least its half covered by native forest. The research was advisored by Milton Cezar Ribeiro (UNESP) and co-advised by Richard Stevens (Texas Tech University). More information in: https://youtu.be/esayT3p2lLM

Today we had our first soundscape meeting, and we discussed the soundscape ecology framework based on the two introductory articles below mentioned. The participants were from Unesp, Unicamp and USP. The most important topics discussed were: i) What is the backbone of soundscape ecology, detached from other areas (such as bioacoustics); ii) The interpretation of animal sound as a biological property related to several ecological processes; iii) What kind of information we are interested to record and to extract with the audio recorders.

We believe that the agenda for this discussion group will rely on strengthening the theoretical basis that compose soundscape ecology and on better understanding acoustic properties and related metrics. Moreover, we intend to establish working groups in the major practical avenues of soundscape ecology framework, including the configuration of the audio recorders to record and analysis of sound files by commercial and non-commercial automated acoustic analysis.

If you have interest on this exciting discussion about our complex and acoustic word, join us.